June 30 to July 29, 2016
535 West 22nd Street (between 10th and 11th avenues)
New York, 212 647 1044

“The Woman Destroyed,” a group exhibition at P.P.O.W, titled after Simone de Beauvoir’s work of fiction, is a latently hostile display of frustration aimed toward overused, female-unfriendly tropes. Picking up where De Beauvoir leaves off in her book, which focuses on the lives of middle-aged women and their unsexy encounters with betrayal, failure, and various crises, these six artists each embody a unique and complicated experience that emerges from such a disadvantage.

Perhaps the poster image for this exhibition is Bag Lady (2016) by Robin F. Williams. According to urban slang, a Bag Lady is a homeless and/or crazy woman who carries all her possessions in an assortment of bags. Another colloquialism explains that if a man wishes to have sex with an ugly woman that he may better his experience by putting a bag over her head. In this painting, the insulting act of hooding her subject with a bag is muffled by the trippy palette, the stormy, gray atmosphere blooming in the distance, and by the subject’s relaxed attitude, which lets the viewer know that she’s been through this sort of thing at least a thousand times. She’s a self-proclaimed Bag Lady that put the bag on her own damn head. Maybe it’s her way of saying that her mind is her only true possession — and that men finding her sexually attractive is not her main occupation. Williams’s other painting in the show, In the Gutter (2015), is a similar display of bad-assery. The model in this picture looks as though she walked off a billboard of naked women selling watches or shoes, and assumed a squat right over a gutter, as if to say “Sell this.” The crass gesture, coupled with her beautiful form adorned in golden shoes and matching belt, reinforce the simultaneously sad and unapologetic situation: a strong, capable woman stuck playing one of the most intellectually underwhelming roles of her life.

Elizabeth Glaessner’s 20 small paintings (all 2016) slip into a deeper, psychological realm. The space is internal, slow, and sludgy; each picture resembles a snapshot from a psychedelic vision or nightmare. Circling, for instance, reads like a creepy transcription of the Three Fates. The color emits a curious internal light and is often applied with direct, gestural mark-making. Helping a Friend has raised, red iron oxide hands in the immediate foreground, which suggest that the dreamer is falling away from, or calling out to, the two figures struggling in the mid ground. De Beauvoir wrote, in The Second Sex (1949), that, “one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.” These images feel as though they move from the emergence to dissimilation of a woman — that a lifetime of memories and experience produce a psyche that is irreconcilable with reality perceived at face value. Glaessner’s figures appear to be forgetting their womanhood.

A similar disparate culling of inner thought and outer being can be found in David Mramor’s work. Mramor, who sometimes goes by his feminine pseudonym, Enid Ellen, features photographs of his late mother. The images, printed on canvas are embellished with smudges and lines of acrylic to create a juxtaposition of reality and painted marks. Ambiguous yet provoking, the pictures seem to point to an inability to access his mother, his inner womanhood, or even a comfortable synthesis of his his male and female attributes. The blatant clashing of language in his work corresponds to a dichotomous sensibility weighted by melancholy.

Moving from male-female to female-animal, Centaurette in Forest (2015), by Alison Schulnik, is a visceral, chunky rendering of a lady centaur. Not a bull in a china shop, but a centaurette in a cake shop, the frantic creature grasping at the sides of her head appears as though she herself is an amalgamation of frosting, wading through the surrounding flora, which is equally goopy. Historically, female centaurs rarely appear in mythology but are occasionally found in Greek and Roman mosaics. Conceivably, this work speaks to the nature of existing without the power to communicate — of being trapped. Similar in both form and content, Lauren Kelly’s digital print, Wall Flower (2011), depicts a constructed mini dancehall. A doll, whose face is cropped out of the shot, sits amid a cluster of empty chairs, wearing a billowing dress literally made of cake frosting. What was made to be tasted and enjoyed by others goes unsampled, either because her choice to withhold it, or by rejection of others.

Looking at Jessica Stoller’s sculpture, Slip (2016), we see again the persistent theme of dessert. The subject of a porcelain bust rears her head, smiling as she balances various pastries, sweets, and plates that have been plopped on top. But unlike Schulnik or Kelly’s females, who are either frantic or lonely, and different even from Williams’s cool and collected women, the figure here appears content — as though she’s merely wearing an extravagant hat to a Surrealist costume ball. Ultimately, what the various dispositions portrayed have in common is a post-angry dissatisfaction with the onslaught of slangs and expectations that women remarkably deal with.

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November 4, 2015 to February 14, 2016
1040 Grand Concourse, Bronx, (718) 681-6000

“The pleasure which we derive from the representation of the present,” according to Baudelaire in “The Painter of Modern Life”, “is due not only to the beauty with which it can be invested, but also to its essential quality of being present.” The passion of such an artist, he adds, is “to become one flesh with the crowd.” Both the subjects and the manner of their presentation in this generous survey of 96 paintings, many of them large, by Martin Wong (1946-1999) mark him as a perfect exemplar of that ideal. Early on he did self-portraits. Then he painted crumbling tenement walls, as in Iglesia Pentecostal (1986); prisons, of which Penitentary Fox (1988) is one and, also, sexual encounters in prison such as The Annunciation According to Mikey Piñero (Cupcake and Paco) (1984)—one of Wong’s great lovers was a jailbird; firemen, as in I Really Like the Way Firemen Smell (1988); street scenes, like Canal Street (1992); brick walls, sometimes shown behind men kissing, as in Sharp & Dottie (1984). His very distinctive dark palette – earth reds, burnt Siennas, ochers, and umbers—was derived from his experience as a potter. Wong loved to put words in his paintings, in book titles, signposts and captions which appear in English and Spanish, but also often in ASL (American Sign Language), as for instance in Psychiatrists Testify: Demon Dogs Drive Man to Murder (1980).

My Secret World, 1978-1981 (1984) nicely summarizes the world found in Wong’s art. Looking into his bedroom behind the brick wall in a down-and-out hotel, identified with a caption above the window, we see a bed; some of his books—he was a collector; and a number of the paintings in this exhibition. Another caption identifies this as the room where the first painting for the hearing impaired was made. Wong grew up in San Francisco, near Chinatown; went to school at Humboldt State University, studying ceramics; and then in 1978 moved to Manhattan.

Just as the Impressionists’ paintings of contemporary life don’t depict every scene found in their Paris, so Wong doesn’t show every subject found downtown in his New York. He doesn’t depict life inside the restaurants or stores. Nor does he usually show families—he focuses on the blank facades, and on gay men. He seems to have been exclusively an urban artist—like Baudelaire, he was resolutely uninterested in nature, or, even, in city parks, or the suburbs. That he associated the words in his paintings with writing in old master Chinese painting is unsurprising, for he was a connoisseur of that tradition. But how different his pictures are from any precedents. Wong was a graffiti collector—his large collection was displayed in 2014 at the Museum of the City of New York. His Sharp Paints a Picture (Collaboration with Sharp) (1997-98) shows a graffiti master with one of his works. But unlike most of those street artists, he benefitted from art school training. His uses of blankness and flat backgrounds and the scale of his best pictures makes him very much a late modernist—Heaven (1988) a big tondo, shows the bricks of a wall in lovingly close detail.

Wong’s first solo exhibition was in 1984. Unlike other East Village artists of that time, he does not appear to have been involved with any theorizing about art. The then much discussed concept of ‘postmodernism’ has nothing to do with his art. But, as often is the case with art rooted in contemporary life, some of his subjects now require identification. To understand Courtroom Shocker/Jimmy the Weasil Sings Like a Canary (1983), which is filled with ASL, you need to now that Jimmy Weasil was Jimmy Fratianno, the mobster who testified before a jury in 1981. Wong’s best pictures are immediately powerful because they are direct. “When I was younger,” he said near the end of his too-short life, “I was always paranoid that I would die before I could finish my paintings.” But, he then adds, “at a certain point I actually finished them.” He was a great painter –he created a picture-perfect presentation of a world that has mostly disappeared, Manhattan’s pre-gentrified Lower East Side.

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Nancy Princenthal, Gregory Volk, and John Zinsser joined David Cohen to review Rudolf Stingel at the Whitney, Raymond Pettibon at David Zwirner, Julie Heffernan at PPOW, Georgina Starr at Tracy Williams, and Ingrid Calame at James Cohan.

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